[I've been
reading]
The Orchid Thief

The story Orleans tells here, which is all true, was somehow made in to the movie Adaptation, which I haven’t seen. The part of her tale that was highlighted and exaggerated in the movie is the least interesting part of this book. Orleans goes to Florida to write about orchid thieves for the New Yorker and comes back to finish an entire book on the subject of Floridians and their orchids and the history of orchids generally. It’s a book about fanatics and the history of orchid fanatacism and does not disappoint. The least strong part of the book, however, is Orelans’s time spent with her subject from the New Yorker. She thinks he’s cool and fascinating. I did not. As a result, she talks about him a lot in parts of the book that I found somewhat boring.